1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to telecommunications, and more particularly, to telecommunications methods that facilitate sharing of spreading codes.
2. Related Art
A telecommunications system that adopts the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) related technologies, such as the Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) telecommunications technologies, may use a spreading factor (SF) greater than one to accommodate multiple users in a cell. Specifically, if the SF is equal to N, where N is a positive integer greater than one, there may be N spreading codes available under the SF in a cell. The N spreading codes may include C(N, 0), C(N, 1), C(N, 2), . . . , and C(N, N−1), and may be orthogonal to one another. Without using secondary scrambling codes, each of the spreading codes may be allocated to one user exclusively, which may be a piece of user equipment (UE). This allows the system to accommodate up to N users in a cell. In other words, the cell may have an effective code resource of N.
However, sometimes the system may need to accommodate more than N users in a cell, without switching to a greater SF or using secondary scrambling codes.